There is a tricky point though. “allocate the revenue to sites based on which content I read” implies mandatory, centralized tracking. I’m not at all sure I want that.
And the private news sites hate it, too! It’s an unfair advantage!
I don’t think it will make a difference if a private company collects the cash, but who knows?
The problem here is that STIM is a private company handing taxes and payout. It is commonly argued that they are paying the wrong artists and has no real track on what is popular. The industry can easily game the system by making their own music popular (formerly pushing it out to all radio stations, not sure what they do now).
Micro transactions might just end up with a botfarm in china clicking articles to generate income for the newspapers. Or even more clickbaity headlines to click. A lot of problems to solve and no solution in sight yet?
Articles cost between $0.10 and $1.15 (most between $0.20 and $0.50). You can request a refund if you don't like an article, which makes the transaction almost frictionless.
The one thing I miss is the ability to share articles without requiring the recipient to sign up for Blendle. Especially since the article can usually be read for free by going directly to the publisher's website. Five or so articles per month to share for free would sound about right.
However, the newspaper style "every article from today" or even "monthly access" still focuses around the thought of "you've picked one, or a very narrow set of news sources and do most/all of your reading there." We're all news grazers now.
We need federation. Let me pay one flat $20 per month bill, and I can read freely from a really broad range of sites-- say "every newspaper from a large wire network" or "95% of the 1000 most popular magazines". It needs to be organized to rein in the publishers, to discourage the "we're the big draw, let's take our content and start a new service" syndrome that has ravaged video streaming.
Seems like the price range is $10-25/mo for many periodicals, so a bundled plan of $20/month might be a bit low.
But I can imagine a $50/mo plan for including two national newspapers, a local newspaper, and a news weekly (e.g., economist) being pretty popular.
But on a network-of-services level, you also have a "value plateau" effect on both the supply and demand side though.
Each news source you add to a network typically provides a little less value than the one before. By the time you've got 100 newspapers in the network, number 101 is probably only contributing a few articles a year that weren't handled first or better by other papers, so nobody's going to pay much more to get it in their subscriptions.
And for readers, the number of interesting articles and the amount of time we have to read doesn't grow nearly as fast as the sheer number of available articles, so each additional provider doesn't produce that much more consumption.
So to be seen as a good value, we need a pricing model that tracks those "plateaus".
So for most general national news, there really isn't as much content as many would think, and adding each one still brings significant value.
The 100s of newspapers you refer to derive most of their content from the big ones, and maybe add their own analysis and slant.
A subscription model that provides access to 2 or 3 of the big ones, plus 1 or 2 local ones, and 1 or 2 special interest ones seems to make a lot of sense.
I really don't want to read a anything about American politics. I am not interested in the vast majority of "news" in newspapers.
I am willing to outbid advertisers to read an article - if there was a convenient way to do micro-payments.
There is a much stronger interest to build a lasting relationship over time with their readership, so the reader becomes familiar with the paper's voice, credibility, and focus. This leads to more revenue: readers will pay more for content they respect). It also leads to better news: a stable revenue source allows papers to plan and better invest in their reporting.
Blendle[1] is exactly that. They are in semi-private beta, but if you follow a link from their twitter[2] you can sign up right away.
Their model is put a few dollars in your account and pay $0.10-$1.00 per article. You can also get an instant refund after you've read, which is supposed to solve clickbait type articles.
They have a lot of major publishers including WaPo, NYT, WSJ, Economist, etc.
Not affiliated, just a satisfied user.
What other tracking could there possibly be once they're tracking everything I view on every site that monetizes its content?
But I think there's more to it than that:
It's customary in trade to not have hidden costs or unintended consequences of using your product, anything otherwise is dishonest. And insisting a product is "free" while having hidden schemes to extract value from customers is scam-y.
Then to say ad-hoc that its a "fair compromise"... but if it was a "good deal" why not be upfront about it, why try to hide it? "You should've read the EULA." Well, a bet a bunch of people being targeted/tracked by Google & Facebook are children, many too young to consent, some maybe even too young to even read...
We need a way to pay a few cents to read an article, ad and tracker free.